Google’s Vice-President for Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, recently shared her insights into the future of Internet search engines.
Mayer says the ideal will be to get access to your friends’ updates in search. There may be increased privacy concerns and complaints from publishers, but Mayer and Google likely won’t be deterred.
Look out! An omniscient, omnivorous Google is coming, and it knows what you want — even if you don’t.
Comment spammers should stop their shenanigans, suggests Google.
Comment spammers abuse comment fields of innocent websites, like blogs and forums, to get inbound links in an attempt to improve their website’s organic search ranking.
In line with its objective to provide Internet users the most relevant and valuable results, Google has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them.
Business owners frequently ask our web content writers, “How long should a web page be?” The answer is, it depends.
Short web pages allow the majority of material to be above the fold, allowing website visitors to click on relevant links to drill down for additional details.
Long web pages provide a steady flow of information, eliminating the need for website visitors to click links.
Websites should be focused on customers’ multichannel experiences, reported Forrester Research. Why, then, is email customer service trapped in a silo?
“Email customer service habitually drives customers further — sometime irreparably — from their online objectives,” stated Forrester’s Diane Clarkson.
In a recent Forrester evaluation of retail websites, websites commonly missed opportunities to use email customer service to encourage web interactions or provide seamless transitions to other channels.
“eBusiness professionals must re-address how their customer service email strategies can keep consumers satisfied,” noted Clarkson, “by re-engaging them with online content, facilitating online purchases, and providing seamless cross-channel customer service.”
What is an SEO writer? That was a question at a recent web writing workshop, and one that gets asked frequently by business owners learning about the Web.
An SEO writer, or SEO copywriter, is basically a writer who develops keyword-rich website content.
Well-researched, keyword-rich content is a highly effective online marketing tool savvy businesses use to gain high search engine rankings, and generate leads and sales.
Accordingly, it’s the job of the SEO writer to effectively optimize website content with keywords that align with popular search terms.
Copywriters, designers, developers — they all have a part to play in building a successful website.
Like life, there are sequential stages of progression. A child learns to lift his head, turn over, sit up, crawl and finally walk and run.
As Stephen Covey points out in his best seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
This hold true for websites as well. The planning, copywriting, design and development take time, too, and need to be a part of the process.
Otherwise, skipping any of these steps cause websites to fall flat on their faces.
Finnish design strategist Sami Viitamäki put forth an amusing list entitled Eight Ways to Kill an Idea.
Here they are:
A few others that might fit:
Check out the illustrated list.
English novelist and journalist George Orwell, one of the finer writers in the English language through such novels as 1984 and Animal Farm, was passionate about good writing. Hence, copywriters — for both print and websites — can learn a lot from him.
Reportedly, in every sentence he wrote, he asked himself at least four questions:
Plus, he had fundamental rules for effective writing, which decades later, still apply:
Microsoft Sites held the largest share of time spent online among the top worldwide properties in Europe (16.8%), Latin America (35.9%) and the Middle East/Africa (33.1%), reported comScore.
Yahoo Sites captured the largest share of time online in North America with 11.2% share, while also attracting a notable 7.9% share of time spent online in the Asia Pacific region.
Google Sites commanded a strong share of time spent online in Latin America (19.4%), Middle East/Africa (9.7%), Europe (9.6%) and North America (9.1%).
Other notables:
Facebook.com, which continues to see significant growth on a worldwide basis, was the fourth most engaging destination with visitors spending 1.4 billion hours on the site in September, up 193% from the previous year.
In September 2009, nearly 27 billion hours were spent on the Internet globally by a record online population of 1.2 billion Internet users age 15 and older.
Read the full release.
Forrester Research recommends that customer experience professionals use personas founded in ethnographic research to guide the design of products, channels, and messages.
However, organizations often struggle to use personas effectively. To overcome common barriers to persona use, Forrester’s Jonathan Browne suggests customer experience professionals should brainstorm with key stakeholders to create roughly sketched profiles of target customers, called “assumption personas.”
This exercise helps build the case for creating real personas, gets stakeholders to think about their business goals in customer-centric terms, and generates hypotheses about target customers for testing in subsequent ethnographic research.
“Customer experience professionals must ensure that assumption personas are viewed as a step toward customer insight rather than an end in themselves,” noted Browne. “They are valuable tools for kicking off persona projects, but they aren’t fit for guiding design decisions.”
